– Browser usage share is the percentage of visitors from a particular
country that are using one particular browser over another on the web.
WebSideStory does not measure downloads, only active browsers on the
web.

– WebSideStory’s global sample size is one of the largest of its kind,
representing nearly 80 million Internet users per day. WebSideStory has
more than 1,300 enterprise customers worldwide, including some of the
most heavily trafficked sites on the web.

“For whatever reason, Germans have always seemed to embrace alternatives to Microsoft when it comes to web browsers,” said Geoff Johnston, a WebSideStory analyst. “Netscape was also very popular in Germany during the late 1990s. Firefox appears to have a stronger foothold in some European countries than in the U.S. Most of these gains appear to have come at the expense of Microsoft.”

Not really astonishing to me:

Up to 50% of German employees work for state institutions or state related companies, which are traditionally paranoid of data mining, spam, browser hijacking and other evil things.

Also German state institutions like universities with hundred thousands of students supports Firefox (before Netscape) for years. IE never had a good reputation.

Let’s see if Websidestory did a good job and compare with my own numbers: